The power couple of AI is getting married in Carmel, days after groom Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund nearly blew up

There's a specific kind of chaos that only Silicon Valley can produce, and this week it belonged to Leopold Aschenbrenner. The 20-something investor, once dubbed the "Nostradamus of AI" for correctly betting big on memory chips and data center infrastructure, watched his hedge fund Situational Awareness nearly implode just as he was preparing to marry Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

The math behind the near-collapse is straightforward, even if the drama wasn't. Aschenbrenner had built his $45 billion fund on concentrated positions in names like CoreWeave and SK Hynix, using three to four times leverage to amplify his bets. That worked beautifully for two years. Then, this week, traders grew nervous about AI infrastructure spending outpacing actual returns, and memory and chip stocks cratered—SK Hynix and SanDisk each fell roughly 30%, and the semiconductor sector logged its worst month since 2002. Rival funds, sensing blood, figured out his positions and shorted against him, essentially betting he'd be forced to sell.

And sell he did, though not by choice at first. Banks demanded more collateral as his positions lost value, forcing margin calls that pushed prices down even further—a spiral Aschenbrenner himself compared to a bank run in a letter to investors. By Wednesday night, he was scrambling for buyers, reportedly courting Sequoia and Greenoaks for a $3.5 billion slice of his Anthropic stake before that deal collapsed. Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, early backers of his fund, stayed at his office past midnight as he negotiated with Citadel and Millennium. Citadel won, with Ken Griffin scooping up the bulk of his public portfolio at more than 10% below market value just before Thursday's opening bell.

The fund survived, shrunk to $10 billion but with the crucial Anthropic stake intact. Aschenbrenner wrote to investors again Thursday, admitting the fund was down 67% for the month but still up 80% for the year, taking "full responsibility" while offering one-on-one calls—the same week he was supposedly honeymooning. Then he went and got married anyway, surrounded by guests who likely included the very investors and colleagues who'd just lived through the crisis with him. He met Balwit at the FTX Future Fund; his fund's seed money came from Friedman, Gross, and the Collisons. It's an ecosystem so tightly wound that Balwit herself joked on X about wedding planners baffled by requests to make things feel like they're "on the cusp of the singularity."